This invention relates generally to information management and, particularly, to an interactive information management system that provides integration between a mainframe computer and an interactive wide area network, such as the Internet.
Although the use of personal computers is becoming increasingly widespread, mainframe computers still store and manage the vast majority of data relied upon by businesses and institutions for their critical operations. For example, a university system will often use a mainframe to house the academic registration data for tens of thousands of students. Database management in a clearinghouse environment such as this often involves the execution of complex software routines by the mainframe computer to control the organization, storage and retrieval of data in a database. With the increasing popularity of the wide area, or global, network commonly referred to as the Internet, many users desire access to information housed in a mainframe via the Internet. Unfortunately, mainframes are typically associated with batch processing rather than interactive use and are not easily integrated with the Internet. In other words, conventional systems are unable to provide a mainframe host on-line.
Those skilled in the art recognize "3270" as a class of terminals, or display devices, for communicating with a mainframe. Customer information control system (CICS) applications written for 3270 input and output provide relatively clean, fast and easy-to-create application front ends for data processing by mainframe computers. Unfortunately, a communications monitor such as CICS generally cannot be extended to the Internet because its transactions are "closed" and only available through a 3270 terminal. A 3270 emulation package, which simulates a dummy terminal connected to the mainframe, usually makes the connections. For example, TN3270 refers to a 3270 terminal emulator program used to connect IBM mainframe computer hosts over a network. The user logs in with a name/password and sends a series of menu-driven commands taking the session to the desired location for data viewing. Since the Internet is completely stateless, this continuous connection is a problem with using conventional CICS and 3270 sessions to provide data access via the Internet.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,754,830, the entire disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference, discloses a server and web browser terminal emulator but requires a persistent connection to a legacy host system. The computer network environment disclosed by this patent uses an application within an application, namely, an applet, which is still a 3270 session within a browse.
For these reasons, a database management system is desired for integrating a mainframe computer with the Internet to provide fast and efficient on-line access to the information stored in the mainframe's database, as well as creating a common gateway interface (CGI) to the mainframe's CICS area.